deepblue69uk wrote:I am quite certain that Starball was STe enhanced as well as Falcon enhanced. It certainly worked on the STFM though. Love that game, I can remember when I got it on the coverdisk of one of the ST magazines at the time in the mid 1990s.

Yes - there's sampled sound on the STE if you have the right files. Took me ages to find the source to prove it though .

well sadly all commercial game developers didnt understand STE arrived. they sticked to STFM primary hardware. thats the sad truth hobbiest was the major formers of showing us what the ste could/can do.

Marcer wrote:well sadly all commercial game developers didnt understand STE arrived. they sticked to STFM primary hardware. thats the sad truth hobbiest was the major formers of showing us what the ste could/can do.

The underlying problem was that to really use the STE hardware you had to design the game around it - or, at the very least, have two completely different game engines. The sound capabilities were easy to make use of because having two different sound engines is not a big thing.

By the time the STE's market penetration had risen enough to make this worth considering, the "games computer" market had been effectively finished by the 16-bit consoles, notably the Megadrive, and their platform fee business model. (After all, it's not like Amiga games lasted any longer). Closed, custom hardware simply couldn't compete without taking a slice of the games money. The PC survived only by being an open hardware platform, where the monstrous economies of scale and having a dual-market by running standard business software.

Had the STE graphics capabilities been added in 1987 - which, frankly, at least some of them could have been; certainly, adding the VAP low byte and writable screencurrent would have cost nothing except the new wafer masks (and they might have even been able to make that back selling MMU updates, since all the MMU chips to that point were socketed and would have been trivially changed at a service centre) - then it would have been a different story, since there would have been three years before the much better hardware came along. But I suspect that until syncscrolling and the like came along they simply never thought it would be useful.

Actually the reverse is probably true - the better the hardware, the lazier the programmer can be. No point in spending six months optimising a sprite routine when you can chuck another sprite chip at the problem. Or trying to squeeze a game into 16K when you could just add another ROM.

The ST had some phenomenal coding, although the guys who really get respect, are the Atari VCS programmers. You essentially program the TV's electron gun by hand, and have to fit your whole program into 2K. With 135 variations.

I had a rant recently about THQ who did all the dire arcade ports the were exclaiming about the next next gen using ssd, more akin to arcade hardware. . . I guess things never change! they saw it a a leap forward, but its going back to roots really!

Dio wrote:Had the STE graphics capabilities been added in 1987 - which, frankly, at least some of them could have been; certainly, adding the VAP low byte and writable screencurrent would have cost nothing except the new wafer masks (and they might have even been able to make that back selling MMU updates, since all the MMU chips to that point were socketed and would have been trivially changed at a service centre) - then it would have been a different story, since there would have been three years before the much better hardware came along. But I suspect that until syncscrolling and the like came along they simply never thought it would be useful.

Sorry I have just updated myself on this thread and seen this comment Dio...

What do you mean by VAP low byte, writable screencurrent? Also why would a replacement MMU be needed?